BY DAKOTA SMITH (’15)

Let’s go back to the morning of December25. Every boy and girl who owned an Xbox One or PlayStation 4 was giddy with excitement to play with all of his or her friends on Christmas Day.

They set up their Xboxs and PlayStations and scrolled through pages of settings until they were finally able to sign into their online accounts to play their favorite games. That’s when the attack occurred.

The notorious hacker group “Lizard Squad” attacked Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network, taking them down for the majority of Christmas day. The group used a Distributed Denial of Service, which created a great amount of fake traffic, which in turn, crashed the servers and disallowed online account owners to sign in.

“I woke up that morning and turned my Xbox on, but I couldn’t connect to Xbox Live,” sophomore Patrick Miller said. “After 15 minutes of attempting to connect, I finally was able to sign in to play with my friends. That lasted about 20 minutes or so, until it crashed and my Xbox froze.”

Senior Alec Chesrown described the event as an injustice.

“I signed in that morning and it seemed to have connected after a bit of refreshing, so I checked my friends list to see if anyone was able to connect,” Chesrown said. “It showed that I had eight friends online, but when I clicked on them it said I had no friends online. That’s when I checked the online status and it confirmed that there was an issue.”

During the hack, Lizard Squad tweeted various statements alluding to their involvement in the event. They were proud of their actions and no one really knows why.

So thanks Lizard Squad for ruining everyone’s Christmas Day in order to gain attention on social media. We all think so highly of you.